Where I live, it is mandatory you take spanish in either highschool, or in a Jr. High highschool class. My 4th grade social studies teacher had a bullshit theory that by 2020 all of the world would be speaking spanish.

English (no shit sherlock)Spanish (for South America and Spain. Brazil... we can live without Brazil as long as we can keep the Brazillians)German (Powerhouse of Europe)French (lotta academic stuff in French)Mandarin Chinese (ching chang chong, China's been on the rise for a while)Russian (Biggest country in the world, pretty much everyone in the rest of the soviet bloc can understand you, .Runet is a useful thing.)Hindi- (Lotta indians out there, although most of them can speak at least broken english (hooray, imperialism!))

Really with one germanic, one romance, and one slavic language, you can't go wrong. Add in some stuff to cover the rest of the globe along with English (yes it's germanic but I don't really think of it as such), and you're pretty much set for life with only about 5-8 languages.

There was a German foreign exchange student at my old school that told one of my friends that if you mispronounce even the slightest syllable in a German word you say something completely different. For instance mispronouncing the "ei" in "Nein" would change the meaning of the word from "no" to something entirely different.

Ben-Jammin wrote:There was a German foreign exchange student at my old school that told one of my friends that if you mispronounce even the slightest syllable in a German word you say something completely different. For instance mispronouncing the "ei" in "Nein" would change the meaning of the word from "no" to something entirely different.